What happens in Vegas shouldn’t stay in Vegas. I was out at BlackHat with other members of the Forrester team over a week ago (seems like yesterday!). It was two jam packed days of popping into briefings, guzzling copious amounts of green tea, and meeting new people and learning new things. In general, I like to keep an eye and ear out for startups to see what’s bubbling up, and came across a few at BlackHat:

Co3 Systems. Co3 Systems* help to automate the four pillars of incident response (prepare, assess, manage, and report) and break down responsibilities and response to ensure best practices are followed along with compliance with regulatory requirements. They just updated their security module to include threat intelligence feeds from iSIGHT Partners, AlienVault, Abuse.ch and SANS, and recently rolled out an EU data privacy and breach notification update to the product. I’m a numbers nerd, so when they let me play with the solution, I immediately started running simulations that estimated the cost of a breach.

FileTrek. FileTrek provides visibility and transparency into where data resides, how it’s being accessed, moved, used, changed, and shared between people, devices, and files. No, it’s not DLP. It’s more like the mother of all audit trails that takes context and sequence of events into account. That way, if someone who is supposed to have access to data starts to do things with it beyond what they normally do, FileTrek will flag it as suspicious activity.

At a recent Enterprise Mobility event, I spoke with a few Asia-based IT directors about their journey in the age of consumerization of IT, and how they were dealing with Bring-Your-Own Technology (BYOT) at work. Their responses ranged from ‘fear of the unknown’ – as in ‘how do we deal with this trend?’ to ‘paralysis by analysis’ – as in ‘let’s arm ourselves with as much information as possible, and analyze it to death.’

The issue is – their employees are already accessing corporate email on their own mobile devices – which means that these IT managers are scrambling to catch up to managing BYOT in their organizations. In fact, an IT head at a large FMCG organization admitted that he did not know where to start managing BYOT.

Security and compliance were key concerns for these IT folks, and their concerns are valid. Trend Micro predicts, for example, that 91% of targeted attacks begin with spear-phishing, a highly targeted type of phishing aimed at specific individuals or groups within an organization. This was heightened in a recent spear-phishing attack on a South Korea bank. The security provider also predicts that there will be 1 million malicious Android apps in the wild by the end of 2013 – another red flag for organizations coping with the rise of Android devices at their work place.

As data flows between countries with disparate data protection laws, firms need to ensure the safety of their customer and employee data through regulatory compliance and due diligence. However, multinational organizations often find global data privacy laws exceedingly challenging. To help our clients address these challenges, Forrester developed a research and planning tool called the Data Privacy Heat Map (try the demo version here). Originally published in 2010, the tool leverages in-depth analyses of the privacy-related laws and cultures of 54 countries around the world, helping our clients better strategize their own global privacy and data protection approaches.

Regulation in the data privacy arena is far from static. In the year since we last updated the heat map, we have seen many changes to how countries around the world view and enforce data privacy. Forrester has tracked and rated each of these 54 countries across seven different metrics directly within the tool. Among them, seven countries had their ratings change over the past year. Some of the most significant changes corporations are concerned with involve:

New national omnibus data privacy laws spanning private and/or public industry. Data privacy regulation, when looked at globally, forms a spectrum of maturity beginning with spotty industry or situation-specific laws all the way to omnibus frameworks. As you might expect, responsible corporations prefer to engage in business practices where the data privacy laws are clearly-defined and transparent. For instance, countries such as Brazil and China are in the process of moving towards potential omnibus laws which will replace a multitude of sectoral and situation-based laws. Other countries, such as Colombia and Singapore, have recently passed far-reaching omnibus laws, also replacing a patchwork of prior sectoral laws.

With apologies to the late great President Ronald Reagan, "trust but verify" is outmoded advice when it comes to computer network security. So, why do so many information security professionals still think trusted and untrusted networks zones are still best practice? Most think that people are trusted or untrusted. The problem with that thinking is you never know who can or cannot be trusted. Remember wikileaks? It was an inside job.

The solution: Zero Trust - Verify Then Trust

Meet John Kindervag, Forrester Principal Analyst and a leading expert in network and information security. He says that firms must take a Zero Trust approach to network security that means "verify then trust". In this episode of Forrester TechnoPolitics, John describes the what, why, and how of the Zero Trust approach to network and information security.

Reflections from the 10th Safer Internet Day Conference in Berlin, February 5th 2013

Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Safer Internet Day Conference in Berlin, organized by the Federal Ministry of Consumer Protection, Food and Agriculture and BITKOM, the German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunication and New Media. The conference title, ‘Big Data – Gold Mine or Dynamite?’ set the scene; after my little introductory speech on what big data really means and why this is a relevant topic for all of us (industry, consumers, and government), the follow-up presentations pretty much focused either on the ‘gold mine’ or the ‘dynamite’ aspect. To come straight to the point: I was very surprised, if not slightly shocked at how deep a gap became visible between the industry on the one side and the government (mainly the data protection authorities) on the other side.

While industry representatives, spearheaded by the BITKOM president Prof. Dieter Kempf and speakers from IBM, IMS Health, SAS, and others, highlighted interesting showcases and future opportunities for big data, Peter Schaar, the Federal Commissioner for Data Protection, seemed to be on a crusade to protect ‘innocent citizens’ from the ‘baddies’ in the industry.

Your customers are consumers too. They don’t turn into business bots when they set foot in the enterprise. Whether your organization sells a product or a service to enterprises or consumers, you’re interfacing with consumers who have opinions about security and privacy. S&R pros, you already know that you have to be on top of things like regulatory compliance (Hello HIPAA! Hi EU Data Protection Directive!) when creating policies and implementing controls. But what about consumer perceptions and behavior? Consider that*:

49% of US online consumers are concerned about security and privacy when purchasing products online

44% of EU online consumers say the same about sharing personal information to access a website

When you fly nearly every week, you can get pretty bored on a plane. When I am sick of working, playing games, or watching movies, my latest distraction is checking out laptop screens. Sometimes I'm curious what movie you are watching but other times I am interested in what type of confidential company information you are displaying for the world to see. In the past few weeks I have seen the following types of information on my fellow flyer's screens:

End of year/end of quarter sales numbers

Disciplinary emails regarding employee peformance

Pre launch marketing information (which I presumed to be under embargo)

Competitive displacement information

Most of the time I suggest that my fellow traveler invest in a privacy screen, and most of the time they are receptive to the suggestion. It really is astounding how many people don't spend the approximate $30 on one. If your company doesn't issue them, I suggest you work to change that stance. World readable aren't the permissions you want on your laptop screen, time for chmod (UNIX joke).

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You remember the tribbles don't you? The cute, harmless looking alien species from the second season of the original Star Trek that turn out to be anything but benign. They are born pregnant and reproduce at an alarming rate. The tribbles threaten the ship, but fortunately Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott is able to transport all of the furry creatures to a departing Klingon ship. The tribbles remind me of technology investments:

You start out small, but before you realize it the technology is everywhere and you are overwhelmed. It ends up in places you never intended.

Like the relaxing purr of the tribbles, the flashing lights of racks and stacks of gear gives us warm comfort at night

Tribbles consume everything, just like the operational requirements of much of our technology investment: resources, budget, and productivity are all devoured.

Data security consistently tops the laundry list of security priorities because it must. Organizations are collecting data, creating data, using data, and storing data in some way or another. Mishandle data or disregard privacy, and you’ve got a public relations fiasco on your hands with the potential to disrupt business operations or hurt the bottom line.

So, we know that data security is a priority, but what does that mean? What are organizations actually doing here? How much are they spending, and where are they focusing their efforts? And what are they doing about privacy? I’ve dug into data from Forrester’s Forrsights Security Survey, Q2 2012 and data from the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) to answer these questions in a newly published benchmarks report for our Data Security and Privacy playbook. Note: This is not a shopping list, nor a check list, nor is it a “spend x% on data security because your peers are doing so!” manifesto. This report is meant to be a starting point for discussion for S&R pros within their organizations to take a closer look at their own data security and privacy strategy.

Now, I wasn’t born in Texas, but I got here as soon as I could. I’ve lived in Dallas, TX for 30 years so I consider myself an adopted native-Texan. I’ll be at South-by-Southwest Interactive this weekend, so I thought I’d share some tips for all my current and future friends. For those of you from out-of-state – known as furriners – I hope you’ll find this advice helpful.